On 4/2/11 4:59 AM, Glenn Linderman wrote:
> "big boys": noun, slang. The well-financed corporations that have a have
> good development processes and practices, consider their web presence an
> important and significant part of their business, and realize that
> browser selection is a user choice.
I believe you have described the null set.
> OK, so I'm surprised at such a report regarding amazon.com.
I'm not....
>> This is _very_ rarely done.
>
> I posit this is _very_ rarely done because browser brand detection is
> hard enough without having to code version detection too.
Sorry, but that doesn't make sense. There are tons of sites out there
using off-the-shelf UA sniffing libraries that actually do sane brand +
version detection. Those sites don't have to think about that part;
it's done for them.
>> Yep. Many do just that.
>
> "There's a sucker born every minute."
That's a cop-out. The point is that people are misusing this stuff now;
there's no indication that they'll stop if we just made it easier to misuse.
>> Empirical evidence suggests months if not more. See above. That sort of
>> timeframe seems pretty typical for large commercial sites in my
>> experience; small sites tend to be more nimble for obvious reasons.
>
> I was careful to say "can be", realizing that large sites probably have
> a requirement to do a month of internal testing before shipping a new
> version.
In practice, that's not as big a problem as trying to get them to notice
in the first place.
> No, it'll delay adoption of the features by many years, because lots of
> users don't upgrade their browsers until they get a new computer
That dynamic is changing. Chrome's users overwhelmingly update when a
new version comes out. Firefox's users update to a large extent too,
and it will become larger with the new release cycle. I'm not sure
about Opera or Safari, but most of the people I know using Safari are
using up-to-date versions.
-Boris